Ex-Midway producer says sometimes multiplayer’s forced by execs

According to ex-Midway producer John Vignocchi, sometimes it’s not the developers who want to toss in a bit of multiplayer in games, but the executives who run the joint demanding it be part of the finished product.

Speaking during a Giant Bombcast last month, Vignocchi used Stranglehold as an example and cited the team’s multiplayer regret.

“We were having this battle all the time, talking about, ‘OK, is a totally amazing single-player experience, the most important thing? Or should it be an 80% single-player experience and then a pretty cool multiplayer?’, he explained. “Stranglehold wnet through that exact same problem. I think if you ask every single person that worked on Stranglehold whether or not multiplayer was a necessity for that product, they would all say, ‘I wish we never did it.’

“It was the worst part of the game, and it was something that executive management had said, ‘This has to be in the game.’ And no one wanted it, and it turned out the way it turned out. That’s something every game developer goes through.”

That’s not a very surprising thing to hear, considering we’ve played a few games with multiplayer that felt tacked on or forced upon us at gunpoint.

You can find this bit at 1 hour, 22 minutes, and 51 seconds into the chat here.

Director John Woo’s told Cinematical that a Stanglehold film is still on the cards. “We are going to make that into a movie,” he said. More games? Maybe. “I don’t have that much time, even though I want to make one again,” he said. “But for the moment, I also am producing two movies. One […]